


Those Three Words

by itsaquinnquinnsituation



Series: X Years Later [25]
Category: Newcastle (2008)
Genre: Canon Gay Character, Canon Gay Relationship, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-12
Updated: 2016-01-12
Packaged: 2018-05-13 10:40:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5704609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itsaquinnquinnsituation/pseuds/itsaquinnquinnsituation
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>About ten-and-a-half to eleven years later.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Those Three Words

**Author's Note:**

> None of the characters or the plot of the original movie belong to me. I am not making money off my work, which is written for entertainment purposes only.
> 
> This is my universe and exactly how I see it. Writing should be enjoyed, not judged.
> 
> I highly recommend everyone to watch this movie.

*****

 

“… But you guys just don’t!”

“What do you mean – ‘we just don’t’?’” – Fergus continued asking with a chuckle. Andy was looking from one to the other with a half-curious half-amused smile, squinting his eyes lazily against the wind like a cat.

“Because!” – She was laughing and her long straight light-brown hair, collected in a high pony tail, flapped in the wind. She grew up to look nothing like Victor, she was much fairer than him, tall and slender, and, overall, she resembled Andy much more than she did anyone else in the family, though, of course, they were not biologically related.

“Because!” – She continued with a smile, - “You guys don’t even call each other anything special! For example, like “babe” or like… like I don’t know, Trisha tells me Derek calls her… “ – She blushed, averting her gaze, - “Sexy mama!”

“Bhah!” – Fergus exhaled, - “Well, I can’t exactly call Andy “sexy mama” now, can I?”

Here it was Andy who laughed, in fact, he snorted so violently that he had to bring his hand to his mouth and nose. Fergus even turned to him and Andy turned away:

“Oh, excuse me!” – He made big eyes and pointed towards the hub, in the direction of which he immediately began running, still keeping his hand over his mouth.

“Oh, gross!” – Fergus’ niece was enjoying this whole situation so much that, upon turning back towards her, Fergus could only shrug his shoulders and smile.

“No, but really” – She lowered her voice, exhaling the last giggles, - “You don’t ever even tell him that, do you?”

“Tell him what?” – Fergus was genuinely confused.

“That you… “ – She pointed with her chin in the direction of Andy’s diminishing figure in the distance, - “That you love him…”

“Don’t I?”

Fergus eyed her. She said:

“Well, I’ve never heard you say it. You know, like my friends… the ones that are like… in relationships, you know, they say it all the time.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And you don’t.”

Fergus just continued looking at her in the same frozen stupor. She asked:

“Do you?”

 

That happened the day before yesterday, Fergus had just returned from Auckland, where he’d spent the previous night wining and dining Leno’s collaborators, and though it was a very early morning flight back and another two hours worth of drive to Newcastle, he felt unusually refreshed. Leno, who must have by then heard all that he had hoped to hear from the collaborators, not only offered him to take an afternoon off, he practically insisted on it and Fergus, leaving his carry-on in the trunk of his car, drove straight to the beach, where he found Andy, his niece, Jesse, and a dozen other familiar faces. 

Yesterday was different. Leno’s collaborators were, apparently, so inspired by their dinner with Fergus that they overnight came up with a new “great big project” that Leno, practically prancing around Fergus’ office and almost splashing steaming black coffee out of his gold-plated mug, spent nearly two hours describing. He only stopped when he actually did spill – then he looked at the brown spot on the shimmering tile, frowned, but then smiled again and looked at Fergus with feverishly glimmering eyes:

“What do you think?”

Fergus didn’t tell him what he actually thought, instead, he paused for a while, then noted:

“But if, as you are saying, this… this… gentleman’s plane leaves Sydney tonight, we have to… we pretty much have to head out to film the interview there right now!”

“Yeah!” – Leno looked out the window, smiled even wider, blinked his permanently inflamed, watery eyes, squinted against the sun, then turned back to Fergus, - "Yeah!”

Fergus sighed. He couldn’t be mad at Leno because Leno loved his work so much, he simply failed to pay attention to the logistics when he got excited about new projects. And he loved Leno because Leno had a big heart, a wild imagination, and a pronounced tendency to engage in semi-philosophical conversations here and there, mostly around siesta time and over a huge bowl of genuine Italian pasta, and in some ways, Leno actually reminded him of Andy so much, that he could not – could never not – love him. Plus, Leno was about 20 kilos overweight and not very tall, so when he got excited he looked like an overheated dough-boy from the famous commercial – which Leno himself was probably involved in making all those years back – so Fergus really couldn’t say no. 

So he didn’t. He immediately reached to collect his keys and his briefcase. 

Whilst driving to Sydney, his cameraman, Andrew, or ‘Drew’ as he preferred to be called, who wasn’t even the lead cameraman or the best one that they had, but simply the one who could collect all his stuff and load it into a vehicle in the least amount of time, asked him:

“Ya kinda quiet… thinking about something?”

He was – but he wasn’t about to tell ‘Drew.’ He was sort of thinking about his niece’s question. 

That night, he had to ring Andy from Sydney at a time when he originally told him he was planning to be already home. 

“Alright” – there was a poorly hidden resignation in Andy’s voice. Andy was very good at accepting that he couldn’t have it all and that, perhaps, if he got that extra ‘afternoon out’ with Fergus the day before, this was a natural flip-side. He continued, - “But Fergs, I am going to bed in bit. I’m exhausted.”

Fergus said “okay” and disconnected.

He noted that Andy, indeed, didn’t say “I love you.” Though this probably should’ve been, at least according to his niece, a natural conclusion.

But he, Fergus, hadn’t said those words either.

 

Timid paws of the sun have been becoming gradually more insisting over the past half-an-hour and were by now dancing all over Andy’s naked arms and legs. Fergus was a lot more sensitive to the light – he always woke up when the surroundings were anything other than a complete quiet and darkness – but Andy could easily sleep through it all. He’d kicked the covers off completely by morning, pushed them onto Fergus and turned and scooted away from him. Fergus didn’t blame him, however – it was, after all, ridiculously warm. Fergus himself had gotten up, cranked up the AC, taken a shower, brewed some coffee, opened some mail, paid some bills online, poured a glass of water and returned with it back to the bedroom, to Andy. And continued to think about the conversation the other day.

As far as Andy was concerned, she really was right, he thought. On the surface. That is, he literally could not think of a time, Andy last – properly – told him that he loved him. ‘I mean’ – he thought, ransacking the corners of his memory, - ‘When did he last say it?’ And did he ever? Yeah, he did. They both did – they definitely did in the beginning, when they ‘defined’ the thing that they had – that they obviously had – and for a long time – for each other, but even then, it felt ridiculous and redundant because everything was already clear as day. But it was nice, too –what can you do – they were barely ‘no longer teenagers’ and it was great and fun, the feat and the step and the milestone and the hurdle and the covenant that it was. 

But since?

‘Yesterday, for example’ – Fergus thought, looking back onto that phone call in the late evening, - ‘Yesterday, he could have said it and didn’t.’

Yeah, he didn’t. He didn’t text it before actually going to sleep either. But when Fergus got home and went into the kitchen, tired, a bit hungry and more than a bit down, he found a note stuck to the microwave door:

‘Pot pie in the oven. Remove Al foil before putting here.’

He almost laughed out loud. Andy, the bastard… He’d drawn the proper chemical notation on “Al” – Aluminium- just like you’d see it on the Mendeleev table. That was ‘Andy humour’, just like the fact that he had to create the note in the first place – or maybe that was ‘Fergus humour’, rather, because Fergus had actually, in the past, accidentally placed all sorts of things in the microwave – glass, plastic, and yes, even metal – he didn’t pay attention to that when he was lost in his thought. 

Andy had actually made the pot pie himself. 

Fergus ate a fourth of it, put the rest away and noticed that a decaf coffee was also already brewed and waiting for him on the warm plate. This time, there was no note, but he drank half a cup anyway, then piled the dishes into the sink and went into the livingroom.

He hated having the wardrobe in the actual bedroom because it usually led to him dressing and undressing in the livingroom for fear of waking up Andy, but he also understood that the point of having it there was to remind him that he probably shouldn’t be coming or leaving when Andy was still or already asleep. So he did that and in his boxers alone, tip-toed into the bedroom to hang up his suit. When he quietly slid the wardrobe door open he immediately noticed that a whole row of freshly laundered work shirts was gently crowded in the corner.

Andy had ironed them. 

He didn’t have to, of course. He was generally in charge of the laundry but he could have easily left them to hang so Fergus could iron them himself over the weekend – he didn’t need them immediately, anyway - work shirts and suits was never something Fergus ran out of. But he did. Fergus kind of loved when he did it. It always lead to that kind of ‘Oh, Andy ironed the shirts…’ kind of feeling, the kind of a special feeling, a peculiar warm feeling that made him smile.

And not at all because it meant he didn’t have to iron them himself.

In truth, he actually always thought that he did it better than Andy. He probably spent longer doing it and was more precise about the creases, but he loved when Andy did it anyway precisely because Andy didn’t have to - and did.

Not just that, however.

Also because into every crease that Andy didn’t manage to streamline as perfectly as Fergus would have, he imprinted those three words that he rarely otherwise said. In fact, if Fergus looked at those shirts, hanging like that in a row, white, blue, grey, pinstriped, one ultra-conservative pink one, it was like they were littered with those words. They were written all over them, up and down, diagonally, back and forth, mirror-imaged, big font, small font, cursive, typed, in Andy’s handwriting like in the Al-chemical notation note stuck to the microwave, those words covered the shirts in a messy heap, glistening on them in a rainbow of colours which were morphing and re-morphing, blurring and re-sharpening again…

Fergus came to, wiped his eyes and shut the door of the wardrobe. He then proceeded to the bed. Andy was laying on his side, facing the window, arms stretched out in front of him and almost hanging off the edge of the bed, as though he was holding hands with the moonbeam when he fell asleep. Fergus, not looking away even for a second, lowered himself onto the bed as quietly as he could so even the hard memory-foam matress barely indented, but just as soon as his head actually hit the pillow, Andy turned and without opening his eyes, reached his hand over Fergus’ torso, grabbed onto him, and scooted his head onto Fergus’ chest. Then he sighed out a meow, rustled his legs and finally relaxed again. 

But he didn’t say “I love you.”

Or, maybe, he did. 

 

Fergus wasn’t that great at those things, either. Somehow, he never remembered to say those three words. What he remembered to do, is to nag. ‘What do you mean, you went surfing?! They had an announcement on the news that they haven’t seen such high waves in years! It’s not safe!!’ ‘When are you going to see the doctor about your neck?!’ ‘Don’t forget to bring your shoes, there are sharp stones on that beach!’ ‘Take that car in to be fixed, or stop driving it!!’ and the like. He was really, really into nagging. But Andy only smiled. He was like that. Who knows, why he didn’t mind the nagging.

But just as Fergus was starting to consider whether he should stop with the nagging, a sun beam hit Andy’s face and Andy whined, sticking a dry pale tongue out between pale lips, winced, and turned away from the window, towards Fergus. Fergus just shook his head.

‘That’ – he thought, - ‘That. Case in point.’

No matter how many times he told Andy to cut down on his consumption of salt, it seemed useless. Last night, for example, Andy spent the evening alone. When left to their own devices, humans frequently engage in their most secret, most embarrassing, or even just most private habits. For Andy, it has always been the sunflower seeds. And if he spent the whole evening alone, he probably polished off a whole soup-sized bowl. Which always meant that in the morning he would wake up with terrible dry mouth and unquenchable thirst, drink several cups of green tea, brush his teeth – a couple times – then have to pee every hour. That whole routine annoyed Fergus to no end. 

But – he was used to it. In fact, that was exactly why he had earlier brought in a glass of water and sat it on the night table. 

Andy must have by now began to feel his stare, or maybe the rays of sun had finally rang the alarm, but his eyelids quivered, he moved a bit and extended his hand out. Fergus grabbed and stroked it. Andy lay like that for a few more seconds during which Fergus wasn’t even thinking of anything in particular, just looking at him and remembering the night before, the note, Aluminium-chemical notation and the row of shirts in the wardrobe and the day before that, Victor’s daughter and her melodious jingling laughter and dimples on her cheeks and white teeth and how much she resembled Andy, though not really, and Andy snorting and dashing off to the hub, and within it all and through it all, he kept blindly running into those words, tripping on them, stepping over them, and stumbling, the three words that were in heart and on his mind all the time, so everpresent, that if he could never overlook them, then every conversation would become ‘I love you, Andy’ and ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you.’

But Andy finally lifted his head, though without opening his eyes, sharply inhaled, exhaled a ‘meow’, then sat up leaning against the headboard, rubbed one hand over his eyes, again stuck the tip of his pale tongue through his lips and whined. And having ascertained that Andy was properly awake, Fergus picked up the glass from the nightstand and, placing it into Andy’s hand, said those three words which he meant to say to him all along, which he wanted to say to him before, now, and in the future, and which, as he realised, came very easily, very naturally and very habitually.

 

Especially, since he didn’t say them in a way that was conventional for the world. He said them in their own language, in a language only they knew because they had invented and were used to speaking it, in a language that was neither understood nor even perceived by the rest of the world. Keeping his own hand closed over Andy’s to make sure he didn’t drop the glass, Fergus uttered those three words. He said:

“Drink some water.”

 

*****


End file.
